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Companies Run By White Men Dominate City Contracts

By

Garth Johnston

Published Dec 17, 2010

Modified Dec 17, 2010

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You see those tiny little lines on top of the big blue bars? Yeah, those are contracts awarded to companies not run by white guys.

 

By

Garth Johnston

Published Dec 17, 2010

Modified Dec 17, 2010

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Just as the city is dealing with a scandal involving four white contractors stealing money from city coffers, Comptroller John Liu has launched a website with some sobering figures about the city's contracts to companies run by women and minorities. Namely how few of them there are.

According to Liu's website only 2.3% of city contracts are going to women or minority owned businesses. How much is that in dollars? That's $398 million on the one side and $16.6 billion on the other. To drill down a bit, that is $125 million in contracts to women-run-firms, $184 million to Asian-American firms and $89 million to black or hispanic-run firms. It's actually a pretty slick, if depressing, site and offers lots of ways to look at the data, including by city agency and ethnic groups.

Bloomberg's folks aren't taking the accusations lying down though, saying Liu's people are comparing "apples and oranges and elephants" by conflating contracts that went to government agencies, union welfare funds and ones that were required by law to go the lowest bidder. Which sounds exactly like what we would expect them to say.

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